Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [137]
“Are you coming, Professor Tripp? Mr. Q. is throwing one last party at the Gaskells’,” said Carrie. “He asked me to come,” she added.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. I watched Jeff follow Hannah up the aisle, his hand at the small of her back. They stopped to congratulate James, who stood pulling at the cuffs of his jacket in a ring of well-wishers.
“Okay, then,” said Carrie, sounding doubtful. “I’ll see you, Professor Tripp.”
“You betcha,” I said, and then I saw Sara, at the other end of the auditorium, by the side exit. She was looking right at me, I thought. I stood up to go after her and raised a hand, but as I was in the act of wildly waving she turned and walked, without a sign, out of Thaw Hall.
I offered Carrie McWhirty a gelid little smile, and when she had left me alone I sat down, heavily, like someone burdened with a fever. I put my hand to my forehead and thought I detected a febrile sheen. The clamor of parting conversation down in the lobby swelled briefly, then died. Sam Traxler came in, carrying a vacuum cleaner and a milk crate filled with cleaning supplies, and walked the aisles and rows of the auditorium, gathering up the larger pieces of trash and stuffing them into a plastic bag. After a while he disappeared, and I was alone. I had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of my best student; all the fruit of the past decade of my life. I had no family, no friends, no car, and probably, after this weekend, no job. I sat back in my chair, and as I did so I heard the unmistakable crinkle of a plastic bag. I reached into the torn hip pocket of my jacket and passed my hand through the hole, into the lining, where I found my little piece of Humboldt County, warm from the heat of my body.
There was a creaking of hinges below me. Sam Traxler came back into the auditorium and started for his shiny chrome vacuum cleaner. Just as he was about to switch it on, I called out to him. “Yo, Sam.”
Without any apparent surprise he looked up, slowly, as if people were always calling to him from the empty balconies.
“Oh, hey, Professor Tripp,” he said.
“Sam,” I asked him. “Do you get high?”
“Only when I’m working.”
I leaned out over the balcony, aimed the Baggie toward him, and tried to toss it, like a dart or a paper plane. It caught in a pleat of one of the velvet swags that draped the balconies of Thaw Hall. I leaned out farther, bracing my legs against the seat behind me, and gave the stiff drapery a tug. The Baggie shook loose and went fluttering earthward like a leaf. Sam came across the hall, bent over, and picked it up. Now I had nothing at all.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Are you serious?”
I assured him that I was, and then I smelled blood in my nose, and the air around me filled with winking diodes and strands of luminous pearls. There was a submarine roaring in both my ears as if someone had clamped a pair of conch shells over them.
“Oh,” I said, balanced there on my belly like a Steinway on a second-story window ledge. Then I felt the block and tackle, as it were, give way. To be honest, I’m not really sure what tipped me. A body the size of mine is subject to the play of the mysterious gravitons that influence oceans and mountainsides. When I fell I would have broken across all those empty seats below me like the Monongahela River in flood. And in the interest of full disclosure I feel compelled to add that for one suspended instant, just before I lost consciousness, I truly relished the prospect. Then I pitched forward, grabbed a couple dusty handfuls of velvet, and started down.
I felt a sharp jerk on my collar. The top button of my shirt sprang loose and winged me on the cheekbone. I felt myself being hauled slowly back over the balcony, then